Summer
by amislee
Summary: Somewhat of an alternate timeline, three years after Chpt 238. Summer, or the end of it.


_**Summer**_

There's a spot, which is on the roof of a sushi establishment called the Tachibana, that offers one of the best views of the Hokages.

Uzumaki Naruto has never been inside the Tachibana, because it sells sushi, and as nice as sushi is _sometimes_, it's no ramen. Besides, it's expensive, which is another thing against it. It can't compare to cheap and delicious ramen. He will be loyal to ramen till the day he dies, is what Naruto thinks.

Besides, when he's Hokage, he can probably have free ramen all day long.

It's one of those summer nights that are too hot for sleeping and too near to fall to be indoors. The way he sees it, nobody should be indoors on a night like this because soon it'll be fall and the wind will be bracing and the rain will be chilly, and then before you know it winter's here and everyone will want to be indoors.

He sprawls on the roof of the Tachibana, gazing at the five Hokages. Insects buzz around him and in the far distance a dog is barking incessantly.

The Hokages look down upon their village ponderously, the moonlight softening the stone planes of their faces. Even after they're dead and gone, their likenesses remain on the mountain face, a blessing and a protection, Naruto thinks. He knows he wants to be up there someday... but he can't imagine looking so grim and thoughtful. So he decides that when he's Hokage he'll tell them to carve him smiling.

And when he's Hokage he's gonna change some things around here. Konoha is his home but that doesn't mean that everything is nice and peachy the way it is and the way it has been for centuries.

He's gonna start with Konoha's most powerful living clan. He'll march right up to the Hyuuga clan head - and it doesn't matter how imposing or intimidating this clan head is - and he'll say, "There will be no more curse seals on children's foreheads. There will be no more Main House and Branch House. There will only be one."

And after he's done that he's gonna make sure that all the fatherless, motherless children in the village - and there are quite a number, as being a ninja is not exactly like being a shopkeeper or a clerk - are taken care of. He will make sure that they have people whom they can call family, people like Iruka-sensei who will love them for who they are, and people like Sakura-chan and - and Sasuke who can be the sister and the brother they never had.

And he will make darn sure there won't be any more wars between the hidden villages, and he's gonna do this even if it means going up to the Kazekage or the Raikage or _whoever_ and knocking some sense into them.

And then he will put the Uchiha red-and-white fan back above the entrance to Konoha's police headquarters, because they founded it and they laid the foundation, dammit, and it's _disrespectful _to just -

And then - and then he will go to the Uchiha ruins on the outskirts of the village - where it is isolated and haunted amidst the bustle of daily life, caught in a time warp, it seems, forever standing still while everything around it moves forward. He will go there, and he will... he will...

Up on the rooftop, he puts his head down on his arms. A warm summer breeze springs up and brushes his hair across his forehead. The sensation, for some reason, makes an ache start in his chest and spread all over, until he feels as if he's aching everywhere and kinda empty everywhere at the same time.

Not even a Hokage, he supposes, can turn back time and change events that have already occurred. If he could, he would go back and he would kill Uchiha Itachi before - before everything else happened.

He would kill him, and perhaps he would even smile while doing it.

-------

Temari hates Konoha summers.

She leaves the Hokage Tower after handing the Kazekage's messages to Tsunade, and the heat wraps around her like a living thing. It's nothing like the desert heat. That is like a weapon; it beats on you like a blunt hammer or slices your skin, sharp as knives. This heat is soft and slimy and slides against your skin like an eel, winds up your legs and slithers into your hair.

She hates it.

She joins the noonday crowd, and judges that it's not yet time to meet Shikamaru at the Tachibana. She has an hour or so to kill and she doesn't know how to do it. Despite paying frequent visits to Konoha over the years as the Kazekage's ambassador of sorts, she doesn't really know anyone here well except Shikamaru. As she slides in and out of the crowd, she notes a few familiar faces - Shikamaru's best friend Chouji and their sensei Asuma having lunch at a ramen stall, and that ninja with the crazy hair and even crazier eyebrows, what was his name, Lee? talking animatedly to someone in the shade of a shop awning.

Temari frowns and tries not to jostle her way out of the annoying throng of people. Why is everything so small and narrow in this blasted village? There's plenty of land out there - can't they expand it a little, so that people can have space to breathe?

She wants to go home. She longs for the wide expanse of the desert, the empty sky, and the _honest_ heat instead of this cloying, insidious variety.

She finally comes to a place where the crowd is thinner, where there are no shops and stalls to attract people. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. Damn Gaara anyway, for somehow imagining that she has the communication skills and the patience to be an ambassador, of all things. More like his personal messenger pigeon, she thinks, irritated.

She sits down on a public bench because she thinks that if she walks some more she may not make it back to the Tachibana - which she walked past a while back - in time. Besides, it seems cooler here, far from the commercial center of the village. Ahead of her she could see high walls surrounding a compound of some sort. The walls are old and crumbling, and beyond she could see the tops of buildings that are in a similar dilapidated state.

They're obviously uninhabited, perhaps have been for years, she thinks, stretching slightly to get the kinks out of her shoulders. And there's an anomaly, right there. From what she has seen of Konoha, the villagers are, in general, an industrious lot. Almost every inch of space is utilized. They seem to abhor waste. And yet, here are sprawling ruins that take up a lot of land and seem to serve no function, and they're still here. It's abandoned - nobody goes in or out. In fact, nobody goes near it at all.

They're a strange people, Temari thinks, as she leans back and stares at the sky. Even the summer sky is different here, filled with white, fleecy clouds. It seems unreal. Nothing like the endless blue of the desert.

People in Suna are practical people. The barren sand makes practicality essential to survival. Survival is utmost. Everything else - is unnecessary. It is this practicality that enabled her father to sacrifice her mother so that he could have a weapon to ensure the continuing survival of the village. She knows it seems barbaric. Who but a monster would kill his own wife and make a weapon of his own son? And as sorry as she feels for Gaara sometimes - he is her brother, after all - she can't blame their father. He was practical.

And here are these Leaf people, who are practical too, and yet not, who seem to be looking ahead and advancing so rapidly in many areas - medicine, law-making, politics - and yet clutching at outdated norms and traditions as if they can't do without them.

Perhaps it's this crazy heat, she thinks as she closes her eyes, that makes them act so contrary. Who can think straight when the heat seems to leak into the ears and play havoc with one's mind? She hates summers in Konoha because everything seems to be pulsating with life, from the sweaty people thronging the streets and the smell of rotten fish at the marketplace to the weeds that grow everywhere they can... and even the ruins beyond those crumbling walls seem alive, moss and ivy crawling over stone and wood, and sussurating leaves whispering secrets in the warm air.

At the same time, and this is where their contrariness comes in - there is a dreamlike quality to everything. When she touches fingers to her face, the heat seems to have coated something slick and smooth over her skin, so that she can't feel herself at all.

Again, she longs for home. She wants to feel the sharpness of the arid air, and the particles of sand that get into everything. It's hard to feel unreal when there's sand in your clothes. She doesn't want to get caught up in the craziness of these people.

"Hey, Temari!" hollers a familiar voice, and she looks up and sees Shikamaru.

He saunters over and slouches while standing in front of her, hands in pockets. "What're you doing here? We were supposed to meet at Tachibana for lunch."

Temari winces a little at the way he drawls. He even speaks lazily. "I was on my way there," she says, slowly getting to her feet.

He grins. "So was I. Let's walk slowly so we can escape the lunchtime crowd. Lunch is on you."

She frowns. "Why?"

"I paid the last time you were here, remember?"

He starts walking and she falls into step beside him. Every time she sees him, she is a little amazed at how unchanged he is from the laid-back, intelligent twelve-year-old boy she had met and fought. His presence is real and solid next to her. Better than particles of sand, she thinks.

-------

Hyuuga Hinata likes plants because they're quiet and very, very calm.

She prefers them to people. People are always so... noisy and confusing and their chakra flares and fades so erratically that it gives her a headache just to look at them, even without the Byakugan activated.

Most of the time she's scared of them. People, that is. Especially people who have the same eyes as she. She's scared of her father, who sees through her and finds her wanting. She's scared of even the Branch House Hyuugas who are supposedly inferior to her and call her "Hinata-sama" with lowered eyes. She used to be terrified of Neji-niisan who did this with the proper humility but with an edge of rage that made her want to run far away from his white eyes and his covered forehead.

Neji-niisan is much nicer to her now, so she's not as scared of him as she was.

In fact, he may be one of the people that she likes as much as she likes plants. Chief among them - the person that she really really likes (more than plants) is... Naruto-kun, whom she can't think about without blushing. And then come her teammates - Kiba-kun and cute Akamaru, Shino-kun and Kurenai-sensei, and then Neji-niisan.

Naruto-kun had said to her yesterday, when they'd run into each other on the street, "Hinata, let's go swimming tomorrow! Summer's too short to be wasted!"

She likes Naruto-kun because he's always so enthusiastic and alive and - he always believes in himself. He never gives up. The closest she has ever seen him lose that self-belief was when Sasuke-kun left Konoha three years ago. Naruto-kun had come back from the failed retrieval mission on Kakashi-sensei's back, injured and hardly conscious. She remembers visiting him in the hospital. She remembers standing in the doorway, watching him as he sat in bed and stared out the window, fingers fidgeting with a forehead protector that she knew was not his. His thumb traced the Konoha symbol on the metal plate over and over and his expression was one that she had never seen on his face before and never wanted to see again. The next day, however, he was up and about, and told her that he was leaving for a while to train under Jiraiya-sama so that he would be strong enough to bring Sasuke-kun back and strong enough to protect those who are important to him.

But she had seen the expression again, one and a half years later, when he had come back with Jiraiya-sama and left again, alone, without a word to anyone. Or perhaps he told Sakura-chan. But Hinata knew where he'd gone to. Or rather, whom he'd gone after. Kakashi-sensei had been sent after him, and the both of them returned four days later. This time the stay in the hospital was shorter, but when Hinata had visited him, she'd seen the same terrible expression on him again, as he stared slack-jawed and dull-eyed at the ceiling.

The only person, she thinks, who can put that expression on his face is Sasuke-kun.

People are so confusing and _fluctuating_ and they act in terribly strange ways. It might be better, Hinata is convinced, if they had a little bit of winter in them, something a little cold, a little remote, a little pristine. If they did, then she wouldn't hurt when Naruto-kun is sad, Naruto-kun wouldn't know the meaning of "grief" and "too late" and "regret", and Neji-niisan wouldn't chafe so much under the curse seal.

A bit of winter, Hinata thinks, is what all of them needs.

-------

Iruka doesn't want to be Hokage.

Come to think of it, he doesn't even want to be jounin. He would gladly remain a chuunin for the rest of his life, if it means that he could continue to teach the children at the Academy.

Kotetsu had once teased him that he liked children so much because he's a big child himself.

Perhaps he's right, Iruka muses, as he stops by the public park one hot, sunny morning that is relieved only by indecisive gusts of warm wind. But sometimes he suspects that the reason has to do with making up. He's making up for something. Perhaps for his own childhood, cut short by his parents' death, or perhaps for Sarutobi-sensei's kindness. He doesn't know.

He does know that he loves Konoha's children as if they were his own.

Childhood is such a dangerous time, Iruka thinks, staring at the boisterous children chasing each other around the park. We are so breakable and vulnerable when we are children. So easily hurt. We haven't learned to build up an armor of protection around ourselves, and so, being trusting of everyone, we leave ourselves open and undefended. And sometimes, if something happens that's bad enough, terrible enough, the wounds never scab over and become scar tissue. They remain open wounds, leaking blood and pus every year as we grow older. Eventually we learn to construct that armor, but there are holes in it, bloody and gaping, and we scratch at them and tear them apart little by little in a blind quest to redeem the past.

He misses Sarutobi-sensei. When his parents died, he had cried alone at their freshly-dug graves, and he had been bitter and angry then, had hated Konoha for taking them away from him, for not acknowledging their sacrifice. But then Sarutobi-sensei had come and had hugged him, and he had thought, _this is the Sandaime, the Hokage of all Konoha, and he has to take care of so many people, but he cares about an insignificant child like me._

Bright sunlight beats down on him and the laughter of the children wakes him from his thoughts. He looks at them with a smile on his face. Two young boys are tussling on the grass, rolling about and getting dirt and grass in their hair and clothes. They're shouting and laughing, and then one manages to get the other into a head-lock and wouldn't let go until he admits defeat. The winner pumps his fists in the air and crows in victory while the other boy sulks for a while and then pounces him for a rematch.

Iruka watches them for a while more and then starts walking at a leisurely pace towards the village center, thinking absently that maybe he'll treat Naruto to ramen at the Ichiraku today.

-------

A thousand miles away from Konoha, there is a part of the forest where maple trees grow. When summer ends, the leaves turn flame red and bright yellow, and fall to earth in a shower of fire.

Fire doesn't remind him of anything, Uchiha Sasuke thinks, as he stands amidst the swirling leaves. It doesn't remind him of a lonely pier, or a quiet river, or the face of a person whose approval he had wanted more than anything, once.

He sees only the leaves, cut off and dying, blown here and there by the chilly wind. He comes here to this part of the forest to train because it's isolated, and it's far enough away from the Sound Village that Orochimaru does not instinctively know where he is or what he's doing.

He wishes, sometimes, that Orochimaru has chosen someplace else for his newborn village, someplace far up in the north perhaps, where everything is white and black, or someplace farther south, filled with cypress forests, swamps and alligators, which he has read about but never seen. But Orochimaru has chosen this place, and sometimes Sasuke thinks that the Sharingan may be making him a little bit crazy, because when his eyes bleed into red the trees seem to whisper to him, _Konoha, Konoha._

He realizes that Orochimaru was born in Konoha too.

A sudden memory comes to him, of - standing on a thick carpet of dry and crackling leaves, watching Itachi practice his taijutsu and thinking, someday he'll be as good as niisan, for _sure_, and - near the Mist Country, looking down at Naruto with a blush on his face and asking, "What did Sakura tell you?" They were surrounded by trees much older and taller than they were.

But these memories are like ghosts, brushing cold fingers against him and then gone.

When he thinks of Itachi, he thinks of a blood red moon, and the sound a katana makes as it slices flesh, and his parents' guts on wooden floor, and his brother's blood sprayed across his face, and his brother's eyes in his hands.

When he thinks of Naruto... there is nothing.

Naruto. Sakura. Kakashi-sensei. These names must have been important to him once, he knows, but now they are mere words that cannot recall anything, free from association and cut off from memory, like the leaves that lie dead and rotting on the ground.

He does not remember their faces. He does not remember their voices. He does not remember if they had spoken together, or laughed together, or had been angry with each other. He does not remember his mother's smile, and he does not remember if his father had said anything to him that had been important. He does not remember if Itachi had ever tended to his scraped knees, or bought him ice-cream when he had cried over some monumental childhood grief.

There is a blood red moon where his memories should be, and when he looks at the world with his Sharingan eyes, everything is bathed in blood and that is what is real.

But in sleep he dreams of Konoha, and though there are no images or feelings associated with it, he dreams of the name, black brushstrokes against white or warm sounds in the humid air, and he forgets when he is awake until the trees whisper it to him again.

That will be the thing that will drive him over the edge, he imagines. _Konoha_, over and over again in his head. He will whisper it to Itachi when he kills him. "Beloved brother. _Konoha. Konoha. Konoha_."

_-end-  
_


End file.
